For more information on the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award please visit our submissions page. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or would like to request a review copyplease e-mail 42 Miles directly. Additional releases from 42 Miles Press can be found at SPD.

This should be my favorite part, right? It’s the celebration. That’s probably why we do this in July.

You know, it’s like I always say, “Fireworks and freedom are nice. But nothing says ‘Sensational Summer in the Midwest’ quite like surrounding yourself with poetry manuscripts, heat, humidity, failing technology, a little bit of cat hair on your t-shirt, and the temptation to announce that ‘all the finalists are winners’. In this version of our future, we spend the rest of our winters churing out generic announcement copy and never quite learning how to do anything on Amazon the right way.

We have been a small press (if defined by laborers) for the last five or six years and you’d think I would have gotten used to this… my procratination turning into actual fear… his indecisiveness turning to urgency and complete commitment. Followed, of course, by a series of e-mails where I string this process along for just another day or a few more moments. You see, once the selection has been made the pressure is suddenly on me to make the announcement.

Think about it… I just suggested that I thought all our finalists were worth publishing and now you want me to publish a post celebrating their achievement?! I don’t ever want to be the reason someone doesn’t give one of our author’s works a shot… I am partially joking, partially exposing myself for how insecure and foolish I am, but I am mostly trying to say that this position is an honor. Typing this post is an honor and an opportunity that I value. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for buying our authors books or submitting to our contest. You might not be doing the Lord’s work, but you’re helping us keep captivating and compelling poetry in the hands of those who not only want it but NEED it.

I usually begin posts like this by saying something like, “Our decision was anything but easy…” No matter how cliche or unoriginal those words might be this year’s contest might have been the hardest to call yet. The 42 Miles Press family would like to welcome their newest member to the family. And while you shouldn’t expect an updated family portrait in this year’s Christmas card… you can expect to see…

[Dramatic pause.]

William Stobb has won the (2018) 42 Miles Press Poetry Award for his manuscript You Are Still Alive. The award includes a $1,000 prize in addition to the publication of his book by 42 Miles Press in September 2019. William will depart from Little Falls, Minnesota and will be invited to give a reading (and raise an appropriate amount of literary hell) in South Bend Indiana. The reading will be co-presented by Indiana University South Bend and will be an evening unlike any other. From Series Editor, David Dodd Lee (& the rest of the 42M crew), we’d like to say, welcome, feel free to make yourself at home.

A LITTLE ABOUT OUR NEWEST AUTHOR: William Stobb is a native of Little Falls, Minnesota, home of Charles Lindbergh and Frank Wachlarowicz, and birthplace of Louise Erdrich. Stobb has also lived in Grand Forks, Minneapolis, Denver, Reno, and now with his spouse and children in La Crosse, Wisconsin, just 200 miles downstream on the Mississippi River from where he was born. He has worked in radio stations and restaurants, sold pool tables, played saxophone in a swing ensemble, written a procedures manual for a public housing authority, and taught a variety of writing classes. Stobb’s previous poetry collections include the National Poetry Series selection, Nervous Systems(Penguin 2007), Pointless Channel (Goss 183, 2011), and For Better Night Vision (Black Rock Press 2000). He works on the editorial staff of Conduit, and on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

To recycle some recycled copy… and polish it up a bit for reproduction: If you are unfamiliar with who we are, what we do, and how or why we do it… you’re not alone. Get to know us in person or via the google machine. 42 Miles Press is based at Indiana University in historic South Bend, Indiana. We publish books (and chapbooks) of poetry, including the winner of the annual 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize. Our yearly contest. Currently, we accept submissions through the 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize Contest. The annual reading period is Dec 1-March 1.

Today’s guest post, an affective singularity, comes from Nate Pritts, who shared why he writes poetry back in July.

An Affective Singularity

We live in a time of conspicuous destruction. Material creation, the biological sphere, spiritual reality – each of these realms are being dragged apart resulting in a fractured world marked by implacable fragmentation, forced estrangement, a fundamental decoherence.

REVIEW EXCERPT: entropymag.org

The first poem, “A Responding Noise,” in Nate Pritts’ eighth collection, Decoherence (42 Miles Press), launches itself in response to an utterance unheard—as of yet—by the reader, yet crucial in presenting clues about the book’s trajectory and poetic commitments. The poem’s perspective largely belongs to a speaker invested in both navigating and describing a world seen as “…so tender” but also “…still so dark.” The disarming directness here of this speaker’s discourse, of the speaker’s stated desire to be open and honest with the reader, gains traction from the word “still.” Does “still” here refer to the ongoing condition of darkness? We can also open the possibility of “still” as the cessation of movement, the fear of what happens when we stop moving, as in Robert Creeley’s “I Know A Man”? Although many of the poems in Decoherence contain and describe individual people in motion (or considering various motions), the ways in which Pritts uses blank space also creates moments of stillness, pauses between clauses and images, allowing readers to experience the speaker’s uncertainties and second-guesses, pressurized by the idea of an elusive coherence.

The 42 Miles Press Poetry Award was created in an effort to bring fresh and original voices to the poetry reading public. The prize is offered annually to any poet writing in English, including poets who have never published a full-length book as well as poets who have published several. New and Selected collections of poems are also welcome.

Manuscripts submitted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award should exhibit an awareness of the contemporary “voice” in American poetry, an awareness of our moment in time as poets. We are excited to receive poetry that is experimental as well as work of a more formalist bent, as long as it reflects a complexity and sophistication of thought and language.

Urgency, yes; melodrama, not so much.

The winning poet will receive $1,000, publication of his or her book, and 50 author copies. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at Indiana University South Bend as part of the release of the book. The final selection will be made by the Series Editor. Current or former students or employees of Indiana University South Bend, as well as friends of the Series Editor, are not eligible for the prize.

Winners will be announced via our website in the summer of 2018. We will also announce the winner in major magazines such as Poets & Writers. The winning book will be published in September 2019 and be available to purchase on SPD and Amazon.

Manuscripts will be accepted from December 1st, 2017 to March 1st, 2018. Manuscripts received prior to December 1, or postmarked after March 1, will be recycled and the entry fee returned.

Excerpt from the review:
“In his cerebral eighth collection, Pritts (Post Human) cycles through the many metaphorical connotations of light, investigating each at close range, and laments the ephemerality of experience…”